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How do you surprise Star Wars fans with a story where the ending is already known?

Rogue One, the robust first spinoff tale in the long-running space fantasy franchise, does it by stealth, which is fitting to this tale of interstellar espionage.

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Felicity Jones, a somewhat surprising casting choice, banishes all doubts as Jyn Erso, the fugitive leader of a band of rebels tasked with stealing the plans to the evil Galactic Empire’s Death Star, a plot-quickening act mentioned in the opening crawl of the very first Star Wars back in 1977.

The British actress is best known for playing the stoic wife of physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, for which she won an Oscar nomination. In Rogue One, she’s a rebel in every sense of the word, fighting not only good and evil challengers but also, perhaps, her own sensible and earthbound image.

One piercing look from her is worth three pages of dialogue, and her character Jyn is ready for action on any world she ends up on; she’s lived as a virtual orphan since Death Star builder Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn, wonderfully creepy) abducted her scientist father Galen Erson (Mads Mikkelsen, radiating enigmatic empathy) in the film’s opening moments.

Jyn is the beating heart of a movie where at times machines and explosions threaten to overwhelm all else on the screen — this is very much a war movie, with its closest franchise comparison being The Empire Strikes Back and its nearest real-world counterpart being the Cold War nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.

The look and mood of Rogue One is exceedingly dark, just as rumour had it, with director Gareth Edwards utilizing the same fleet camera moves and organic visual sense he brought to Monsters and Godzilla.

Scripted by Chris Weitz (About a Boy) and Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), this backstory to the Star Wars canon is, in narrative terms, the fertile loam from which sprang all the battles and schemes of George Lucas’ wild universe; it’s fitting that cinematographer Greig Fraser (Lion,Zero Dark Thirty), films it with a tangible sense of rough and gritty worlds of barren deserts, lush jungles, forbidding moons and imposing skyscrapers.

References to the main Star Wars series are tangential, as they are meant to be, with familiar characters, places and incidents looming into view and just as suddenly disappearing, like an X-wing starfighter zooming past. Withholding proves to be as effective as showing: when a lightsaber finally appears, late in the movie, it’s a shock to the senses. (Conversely, when John Williams’ familiar Star Wars theme sounds from amidst Michael Giacchino’s clamorous score, it’s a balm to battered ears.)

It’s already been revealed that Darth Vader, the Dark Lord, is among the series callbacks. As sinister as ever, once again voiced by the great James Earl Jones, Vader is a masked menace bent on making his fascist Empire omnipotent while forcing this galaxy far, far away to tremble from the apocalyptic heat of the planet-smashing Death Star.

But to do so, Vader and his Stormtroopers and other stooges must get past the Rebel Alliance, the stout resistance movement that here includes a fantastically diverse team of action heroes.

Standouts include Mexico’s Diego Luna as Cassian Andor, an Alliance intelligence officer whom Jyn reluctantly teams with but who matches her for battlefield heroics; Chinese stars Donnie Yen as blind martial arts fighter Chirrut Îmwe and Jiang Wen as his sharpshooting sidekick Baze Malbus; England’s Riz Ahmed as Bodhi Rook, a cargo pilot who used to toil for the Empire but now flies with the rebels; and America’s Forest Whitaker as Saw Gerrera, the Jedi-trained warrior and early guardian of Jyn who does the right thing but strictly on his own terms.

Most appealing of all is new droid K-2S0, or K-2 for short, a seven-foot-one hulk of ebony hue and abundant energy, voiced by veteran character actor Alan Tudyk, who fusses like C-3PO but wisecracks like Han Solo. He’s likely to become a fast fan favourite, just as BB-8 did in last year’s main series reboot, The Force Awakens. Fan fears that Rogue One would be grim and mirthless, prompted by whispers of late reshoots and script doctoring, evaporate whenever K-2 is on the screen.

K-2 is forever predicting doom for the Rebel Alliance but his opinions are strictly minority ones, especially in the big picture of Rogue One’s commercial prospects, where success is assured. Much more than a mere sideshow in the Star Wars saga, these rebels build on a brilliant legacy.

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